Two percent sounds like a rounding error. If your warehouse ships 5,000 order lines a week, it means roughly 100 of them go out wrong. Do that math across a year and the number stops feeling small.
What one wrong pick actually costs
A mispick is never just the part. It's the customer call, the return shipping, the restock, the re-pick, the credit note, and the slice of trust you spend every time it happens. Industry estimates put the fully loaded cost of a single mispick anywhere from $20 to $100 once all of that is counted.
Take the midpoint and the 100-lines-a-week warehouse is quietly burning six figures a year - on errors, not on growth.
Where the errors come from
Most picking errors trace back to a handful of causes: lookalike SKUs stored next to each other, paper pick lists that go stale the moment they print, and confirmation steps that are easy to skip when the floor is busy.
Scan-verified picking removes the guesswork: the system confirms the operator is at the right bin, holding the right item, in the right quantity, before the line is closed. Pair that with lot and serial capture and a wrong pick becomes hard to make in the first place - not just easy to trace afterward.